me too. 11 years. totally habituated by this time. can i feel proud of that? can't let something as inane as that rule your life. had friends who have been floored by it.

the t is a pet-subject. fascinating. other pet sujects... as god was kind enough to bless me with both, are asthma and migraine. thanks! just makes one stronger, though. i'm for punk migraine, punk asthma, punk tinnitus.

and here here robert. dead right. got mine playing in bands and working in factories whilst summer jobbing it as a student.

Cheers kek. The stats are alarming, really. But, for me - as with all tiresome malodies, the side-effects of being a physical entity, no less - the small t falls into that 'whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger' catergory. I remember one time, though, on top of Hellvelyn, in the Lake District; hard climb across Striding Edge - one rightly feels a sense of achievement, mixed with a glad-to-be-alive feeling. A wonderful scene up there - it's like a park, flat enough that they used it to land a plane in, I think, 1926, as a stunt. There were about 50 people dotted about, eating butties etc. Serenity. But mixed in with the silence at 3118 feet was my friend the whitenoise. It is a bit of a fly in the ointment, for sure.

Dead right, CJ. The big D is no fun, I can imagine. But, again, it's about getting on with it. I can't remember a time when dogs didn't make me sneeze then cough then get short of breath; so there isn't a non-asthma version of me out there to fantasise about. It's like having a weird 6th sense. I go into a room ... dog ... asthma sense is tingling! It plays a small part in who I am, though - as I'm lucky that I've had one serious attack in 44 years. The rest is inconvenience. I don't take drugs for it. The t is incurable; so drugs again. It's the migraine which really invades. But, once again, I've had the condition for 30 years; so can barely recall a time before it. At bottom, I find all this mechanical and chemical dysfunction very interesting. The dig D is weird - like your own body attacking you. Same with my allergy to dogs: my body detects dogs as a threat. So it narrows my lung capacity to keep the threat out. It narrows it so much if one continues that it kills you! Nice one, god!

without wishing to reducing this awful complaint to a pun it sounds terrible.living with diabetes is relatively easy as long as you (by and large) keep within the paremeters. the big T, as you call it, would drive me quite mad. we all at times get a ringing or buzzing sound in our ears. That is bad enough but a constant buzz must be incredibly irritating to say the least.